Teaching Business Teams to Build With AI

A guided Build Day gives business teams a way to practice AI beyond a question-and-answer chat. Sam Irizarry’s introductory sessions connect tool setup, reusable instructions and a small project in a sequence participants can follow.

Start with the people in the room

Sam led the broader enablement work and personally ran the beginner sessions. A colleague owned the advanced curriculum, allowing the program to support different levels of technical experience.

An earlier beginner session exposed a practical problem: account and setup differences consumed more time than expected. Participants needed help before they could begin building, and the planned independent-build portion did not fully take place.

That experience informed the next plan. It called for a shorter introduction, a shared dashboard exercise with common sample data, and then time for participants’ own ideas. The beginner track did not depend on a code repository or deployment.

Follow one project through the tools

Sam’s typical introductory Cowork format runs for two to three hours, with additional time for larger groups or more detailed work. The session moves through five connected activities:

1. Get familiar with Cowork and how to guide the assistant
2. Connect approved tools through connectors and plugins
3. Use or create skills for reusable instructions
4. Set up a project and scaffold its structure
5. Work on a dashboard and a scheduled task that enriches it

The dashboard provides a common thread. Context, skills and scheduled work become parts of the same exercise, so participants can see how the pieces relate and discuss the result together.

Make room for practice

The lesson from the earlier session was specific: setup needs its own attention. When account access and configuration consume the session, participants lose the time intended for practice.

A shared starting point can make the guided portion easier to follow. Separate beginner and advanced tracks also let the instructor adjust the pace without asking every participant to take on the same technical work.

This experience reflects Sam’s approach to training: use a concrete task, notice where participants need help, and adjust the session plan around those needs.

Plan a session for your team

A useful starting brief includes the task you want to practice, the participants’ experience and the tools they can access. EAC uses that information to discuss the session format and preparation.

Discuss a team workshop

Scope: Enterprise experience, separate from EAC client work; the organization is anonymized. Shared-exercise refinements were planned. This account describes instruction and curriculum, without claiming universal participant completion, production deployments or quantified results.